NACCHO Policy statement on Cannabis

The National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) has published a policy statement, Medical and Recreational Cannabis and Cannabinoids, to assist health departments considering approaches to medical and recreational cannabis within their communities. The policy statement was proposed by NACCHO’s Public Health Law Workgroup and approved by the NACCHO Board of Directors.


New MeSH 2018 terms now posted

Finding the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) term for your search topic can often help you retrieve more relevant results and help ensure that you don’t miss articles.

MeSH is the National Library of Medicine (NLM) controlled vocabulary thesaurus which is updated annually. NLM uses the MeSH thesaurus to index articles from thousands of biomedical journals for the MEDLINE/PubMed database.

Every year, NLM reviews the MeSH thesaurus and considers changes in terminology. New concepts are constantly emerging while old concepts are in a state of flux, and NLM adjusts MeSH terminology and usage accordingly.

This year 113 MeSH headings were either changed or deleted and replaced with more up-to-date terminology. 471 new MeSH Headings were added to MeSH in 2018.

One major change is to the MeSH vocabulary for smoking and smoking-related terms. These have been updated and expanded for 2018.

Several smoking-related terms are now new MeSH terms. These are:

* Tobacco Smoking
* Cigar Smoking
* Cigarette Smoking
* Smoking, Non-Tobacco Products
* Smoking Reduction

Other new smoking-related MeSH headings to note are Smokers, Smoking Devices, and Smoking Prevention.

Remember that the new MeSH won’t have a lot of articles tagged with them just yet, and most are not retroactive.

The NLM has an online article that you can read if you’d like to learn more about changes in MeSH. It includes a link to the entire list of new terms.

Want a quick MeSH refresher? We have a MeSH Tri-Fold available for you. Or call us with your questions at 510-642-2510.


Using Electronic Health Data for Community Health: Example Cases and Legal Analysis

Have you ever wondered about the hospital data that might be available to you and how you might obtain it? How does HIPAA affect the data you can get access to? And how might you use the data once you’ve got it? If so, then you may want to read on!

This 21 page white paper from the de Beaumont Foundation and Johns Hopkins University was written for public health departments. It gives you a framework that will help you request data from hospitals and health systems – data that can help move the needle on critical public health challenges.

You’ll find six examples of how you might use electronic health data to make progress on childhood asthma, a common and preventable chronic illness. You’ll also read answers to some frequently asked questions about the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Each case includes a brief discussion of how it might be applied to other public health challenges. Possible applications include monitoring opioid overdoses via data on emergency department visits, assess falls prevention efforts, and map diabetes or lung disease hot spots.

You’ll find this paper available to read for free online here.


Public Health Law Academy

Find the law challenging to understand? Want a clearer understanding of the role it can play in improving population health? Then you may wish to explore the online trainings provided by the Public Health Law Academy.

The Public Health Law Academy, supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gives you a deeper understanding of the use of law and policy to improve population health outcomes. Developed in cooperation with ChangeLab Solutions, the easy-to-use online trainings offered here are essential for all public health professionals.

These online trainings are appropriate for all public health professionals, including public health lawyers, public health nurses, public health educators, public health advocates, and public health faculty and students.

The Public Health Law Academy currently offers introductory courses as well as classes on hot topics, and plans to add courses in legal epidemiology soon.


Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA) workshop

Ingenuity Pathway Analysis

A representative from Qiagen will offer a hands-on training workshop on using IPA to interpret expression data (including RNA-seq).

Date: Thursday, Nov. 9
Time: 1:30-4:30 pm
Location: Bioscience Library Training Room, 2101 Valley Life Sciences Building

You are invited to participate in this free training, and are encouraged to bring your own laptop or use the computer workstations in our training room.

Please register if you are interested in attending.

The workshop will cover how to:

  • Format, upload your data, and launch an analysis
  • Identify likely pathways that are expressed
  • Find causal regulators and their directional effect on gene functions and diseases
  • Build pathways, make connections between entities, and overlay multiple datasets on a pathway or network
  • Understand the affected biological processes
  • Perform a comparison analysis: utilize a heat map to easily visualize trends across multiple time points or samples

Questions? Please contact Elliott Smith (esmith@library.berkeley.edu)


ASHRAE Standards and Guidelines: now online!

UC Berkeley researchers now have full online access to standards issued by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). ASHRAE Standards and Guidelines are widely used by researchers and professionals in the design and maintenance of indoor environments and those interested in refrigeration processes. Access is provided through the Techstreet Enterprise platform and requires the proxy or VPN from off-campus.

In addition to the Standards and Guidelines, ASHRAE also publishes a series of Transactions and Handbooks. Interested in other ASHRAE publications? Check OskiCat for access or contact a librarian for help!


Making Scientific Writing Painless: An iBiology video

Are you working on a scholarly paper in the hopes of getting it published? Then you might want to watch this short video by Ian Baldwin! In fourteen minutes, Dr. Baldwin introduces you to the reverse engineering techniques that he uses in his own writing. He also discusses ways to design your figures and charts to ensure that they convey the results of your research in a clear and meaningful manner. His tips might save you time and effort!

Dr. Ian Baldwin is a professor and director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology.

iBiology started in 2006 by UCSF and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Professor Ron Vale. It now includes over 300 seminars and short talks by the world’s leading scientists. iBiology is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and the Lasker Foundation.


Baby Food FACTS (Food Advertising to Children and Teens Score): Nutrition and marketing of baby and toddler food and drinks

Baby Food FACTS examines the nutritional quality of food and drink products for babies and toddlers up to age 3. It also evaluates the advertising used to promote these products, and looks at how well they correspond to expert advice about feeding this age group.

Written by the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, the report was compiled using a variety of data sources and methods. It focuses on data for marketing in 2015 and nutrition content and product packaging in April to June 2016. It also documents changes in advertising over the past five years where possible.

Support for this project was provided by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.


Healthy People 2020 Health Disparities Data Widget

Have you every wanted an easy way to find health disparities data related to the Healthy People 2020 objectives for the Leading Health Indicators (LHIs) for your report, website, or factsheet? Now you have a tool that might help!

The Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP) and the Office of MinorityHealth (OMH) have released a new health disparities data widget. The widget provides charts and graphs of disparities data at your fingertips.

You can browse the widget to find its charts and graphs by:

– Disparity type (disability, education, income, location, race and ethnicity, and sex)
– Leading Health Indicator

Once you find the chart or graph of interest, you can link out to more! You’ll find links to more data, infographics and more resources below the text summary to help guide you.


Behavioral Health Barometer, Volume 4: A New Report from SAMHSA

Behavioral Health Barometer, Volume 4. This new report from HHS/SAMHSA presents national data about the prevalence of behavioral health conditions, such as the rate of serious mental illness, suicidal thoughts, substance use, and underage drinking.

In it, you’ll find a concise, reader-friendly summary of key behavioral health measures. The graphics and text include data on the nation as a whole and for subgroups based on demographics such as age, gender, and race/ethnicity, and other factors such as poverty and health insurance status.The indicators are taken from the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health and National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services.